Post a Comment On: ehewlett

Fascinating. An article was just published in one of my favourite online magazines, Wired, entitled "Help, I'm trapped in Facebook's Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory" which details a pseudonymous user going through almost exactly the same experience as I went through. In attempting to get her long-established pseudonymous Facebook account reactivated, the article's author, Nadia, received a series of form letters, as I did. In pointing out the significance of being excluded from Facebook, Nadia argues, as I did, that "by imposing barriers to entry—and blatantly excluding some people—Facebook is limiting freedom of expression," noting that the ACLU argues more or less the same thing when it noted that Facebook "has become the modern equivalent of the town square." And, as a fellow exile from Facebook, Nadia's list of the things that she actually misses: "my friends’ photos of their kids, the status updates about nothing in particular ... the ... rants that some of my ... friends go on ... even ... birthday notifications," resonates with me as well.

An even more significant parallel, I think, is Nadia's speculation that her Facebook support person, Terry, was actually a "bot", which parallels my worry that "we are getting a glimpse of what life under our new robotic overlords may be like." With more inside access than I, Nadia "did learn that Terry is not, in fact a robot, but a person." This raises two disturbing implications. If it is true that (as Nadia states in her article) "Facebook has said it does not use algorithms to crawl through usernames and instead relies on snitches," that would mean that not only my own account, but all the other Orthodox clergy accounts that have been suspended for including their clerical titles, were actually flagged - and marked for suspension and/or forced renaming - by real human beings. This strikes me as something far more serious than simply being flagged by an algorithm. Systemic persecution? Or, at best, thoughtless yet deliberate extinction of a two thousand year-old subculture?

The other disturbing implication this raises stems from the mistake that both Nadia and I naturally made upon realizing that we were simply being sent form letters: we mistook humans for robots. What sort of society are we living in when the behaviour of real human beings is so altered by our policies and systems that we mistake it for the behaviour of a robot? Camazotz, anyone? Is it perhaps not a coincidence here that the fundamental system underlying this behaviour, Information Technology, is generally abbreviated as IT?

Nadia's ultimate summation of her experience is ultimately eerily similar to my own: "All I’ve gotten for my troubles are nearly two dozen emails from Facebook informing Nads about everything she’s missing out on by not logging in, and a request for feedback about my experience." It may not be an experience of purgatory, strictly speaking, but the bureaucratic nightmare and the reductive robotic behaviour are disturbingly similar to Screwtape's description of hell.